The Power User's Guide to Video Encoding with Handbrake

Whether you own an iPod touch, Zune HD, Nintendo DSi, or any number of other portable devices, there's one tool that makes easy work out of ripping DVDs and converting incompatible video files into manageable formats: Handbrake. This wonderful utility has just about everything you could ask for, including robust compatibility, a slick interface, and snappy performance. And if that weren't enough, the developers have chosen to give the program away for free, no strings (or trialware) attached.

We realize we're probably preaching to the choir and there's a good chance you've used Handbrake before, if not frequently. But do you know how to create, backup, and transfer your own custom settings for the Xbox 360, PS3, and other popular media players not included by default? Do you know how to encode a copy protected DVD with the least amount off fuss? We do, and on the following pages, we'll guide you through a series of advanced tips for getting the most out of Handbrake.

How To Create Your Own Custom Profiles

The latest version of Handbrake (0.9.4 at the time of this writing) packs a bunch of new features into an already stellar product, but it also strips away some functionality you may have grown accustomed to, including preset profiles for the PSP, PS3, and Xbox 360. According to the developers:

"Quite frankly, [these presets] didn't work well. None of the development team members own the devices, so testing was minimal and support was non-existent. Keeping up with the firmware vagaries and ambiguous specifications of these devices was not fun -- we get enough of that from Apple's kit, and those we have around to test on. The new "Normal" preset should work perfectly fine on any device that supports standard Main Profile H.264 with AAC-LC audio in an MP4 file, which the PS3 and 360 ostensibly do."

We can certainly dig the new Normal preset, which works well with a range of devices, but a little customization can go a long way, and we're going to show you how to make your own profiles.

Open up Handbrake and take note of the Presets column on the right-hand side. Handbrake comes with a handful of pre-configured settings, most of which are Apple-centric. To create your own custom profile, you would just click the Add button. In the pop-up box that appears, give your custom profile a name and press Add.

There are seven tabs to navigate on the left-hand side of the main window, all of which can be customized. When you're finished setting up your profile, just right-click it and select Save Changes. But what settings should you use? Equally important, what does each setting do? Let's have a look.

Image Credit: reneeashleybaker.files.wordpress.com

Advanced Settings Explained

Reference Frames, Motion Estimation Method, Pyramidal B-Frames, oh my! Don't worry if you don't know what any of these do, we're going to give you a quick rundown, and then show you the exact settings to use for a variety of popular devices.

Reference Frames: Higher values yield better quality videos, but also take more time to encode. Set it too high and you could run into playback issues.

Mixed References: Video frames are divided into blocks called 'macroblocks.' Checking this box (and thus turning Mixed References on) allows different references to be used for different parts of each macroblock, potentially resulting in a higher quality rip.

B-Frames: Stands for bi-directional frame and is a compression method. Handbrake's developers recommend using a higher value (9-16) for animated content.

Adaptive B-Frames: Allows x264 to determine the number of B-frames to use.

Direct Prediction: Tells x264 what method to use when guessing motion for certain parts of a B-frame. If set to spatial, x264 will compare parts of the current frame, whereas temporal tells x264 to compare against the following P-frame. Handbrake's developers recommend choosing spatial over temporal.

Weighted B-Frames: Rather than base a B-frame's motion compensation on frames both and after with equal influence, weighted B-frames takes into consideration the distance from the frame being encoded.

Pyramidal B-Frames: As a High Profile feature, Handbrake's developers warn that enabling this setting will prevent your video from playing in Quicktime. What it does is treat each previous B-frame as a reference, resulting in higher quality, lower bitrate rips, but "at the expense of complexity."

Motion Estimation Method: Selects the way motion is detected by x264, ranked in order from the fastest encode time (at the expense of quality) to slowest, with Diamond being the fastest.

No DCT Decimate: Tells x264 to "zero out" blocks when they won't be noticed by the viewer. Can be useful in reducing file sizes, but can also introduce unintended artifacts.

Deblocking: Smoothes out blocky compression artifacts. The higher the value, the more aggressive it works.

Recommended Xbox 360 Settings

Reference Frames: 2

Mixed References: Checked

B-Frames: Default (3)

Adaptive B-Frames: Off

Direct Prediction: Automatic

Weighted B-Frames: Checked

Pyramidal B-Frames: Unchecked

Motion Estimation Method: Uneven Multi- Hexagon

Subpixel Motion Estimation: 9

Motion Estimation Range: Default (16)

Analysis: All

8x8 DCT: Unchecked

CABAC Entropy Coding: Checked

Trellis: 0

Psychovisual Rate Distortion: All the way to the right

Psychovisual Trellis: N/A

No Fast P-Skip: Checked

No DCT-Demicmate: Unchecked

Deblocking: -2 (top), -1 (bottom)

Playstation 3

Starting from scratch isn't always the best way to approach this, and that's sometimes the case with the PS3. Rather than create a brand new profile, select High Profile (under the Regular heading) and leave the default settings. In the Destination field, manually change the file extension to .mp4.

iPod / iPod Touch / iPhone

As we previously mentioned, Handbrake is very much an Apple-centric program, and if you own of these devices, you're in luck. Unlike the PS3, Xbox 360, and PSP, the latest version of Handbrake includes preset profiles for the iPod, iPod touch, and iPhone. Just select and rip!

Playstation Portable (PSP)

Another casualty of the Handbrake's latest release, the program no longer includes a PSP profile. There are different ways you can approach this, but we've had good luck following tedtaylor's suggestion over on Handbrake's forum.

Start off by selecting the Apple-Universal profile. Next, head over to the Picture tab and select None from the Anamorphic pull-down menu. You should now able to the set the width and height of the video to 480 (h) x 272 (w).

Now navigate to the Video tab and click on the Avg Bitrate (kbps): radio button. Change the value to 768. If you run into problems playing video on your PSP, try a lower setting.

Recommended Zune HD Settings

As one of the newest kids on the block, Handbrake also turns a cold shoulder to Zune HD owners, at least in terms of a preset profile. That's okay, because like the Xbox 360 profile, we're going to create our own. Follow the same steps to add a new profile, and then input the following settings:

Reference Frames: 1

Mixed References: N/A

B-Frames: Default 0

Adaptive B-Frames: N/A

Direct Prediction:N/A

Weighted B-Frames:N/A

Pyramidal B- Frames:N/A

Motion Estimation Method: Default (Hexagon)

Subpixel Motion Estimation: 6

Motion Estimation Range: N/A

Analysis: Default

8x8 DCT: Unchecked

CABAC Entropy Coding: Unchecked

Trellis: N/A

Psychovisual Rate Distortion: All the way to the right

Psychovisual Trellis: All the way to the left

No Fast P-Skip: Checked

No DCT-Demicmate: Unchecked

Deblocking: Default

For HD videos, navigate to the Picture tab, select None under the Anamorphic pull-down menu, and set the width and height to 1280x720.

I have to say been a subscriber to mag since it was boot mag and this is best article you have had. But it really needs updating now. Since it was written much has changed with Handbrake, they dropped the xvid codec support and now only support H.264, support Bluray, and support of new built in profiles.

And we now have WD Live, Android Phones, iPads and MKV is becoming a more standard container for home media while MP4 remains the dominent choice in portables.

I think the importance of an updated article like this is huge with portable pads taking off and now Android in the mix. Please update it!

Also there are some good commercial one click choices out there for the tech challenged as well but maybe thats a separate article.

I believe MakeMKV has had some big updates and BD-Rebuilder while in beta is pretty solid now and recently the author added hidden opts to provide for ability to remove certain bluray content while still keeping the menus. tsmuxer has fixed bugs and so has eac3to.

I know this article was titled Handbrake, but it really went alot farther then I would expect which was great. Please do the same for next article but I might call it the ripping guide or something. I know you did a ripping guide article as well but that was in 2009.

"Rip Blu-ray to MKV (and Retain Chapters and Subtitles)"I'm just to add a comment for this solution- a new released app called ByteCopy now rips Blu-ray to MKV and retain chapters and subtitles like MakeMKV does, and meanwhile downmix TrueHD/DTS-HD audio to AC3 if you like. I think it very useful and recommend it as a top Blu-ray to MKV ripper.

Has anyone found a freeware alternative to DVD2One for merging different video files. I downloaded the trial version and found that I couldn't join a 2 disc movie because of a 2 hour limit built into the trial version. I've only got a few 2 disc movies to do this to, so I'm not willing to spend the $60 for the full version.

I don't know if this is a new change or not, but I just
installed DVDFab HD Decrypter on my Win7 64 OS & it said it was free to use
HD Decrypter but all the others (DVD to DVD, Blu-Ray to Blu-Ray, etc) were available
for "Trial User" License for 30 days. When I open up the
"Free" HD Decrypter & select Full Disk or Main Movie under DVD to
DVD it tells me that I'm now starting my 30 trial of DVD to DVD.

Now, sorry for my ignorance if my question if it's one of
those "DUH!" things but I'm new to the world of 64; Why doesn't DVD
43 work in 32bit mode? More than half of my software is 32bit, I'm gonna copy
the decrypted Folder to my HDD & run from that anyways. If I have to I can
always Copy the folder on my 32bit laptop, transfer it over & encode it in
Win7, but if I can avoid the extra step & transfer. Now that I think about it, HandBrake runs in 32bit mode, so what's the
problem with DVD43? Does the, essentially compatibility mode, prevent it from accessing
the proper resource?

Needs more information on how to get the subtitles to work. And I don't just mean this guide, I mean the entire internets. I've scoured around Google and Bing to try to find some help but I still can's get the "soft" subtitles to work despite countless attempts.

I have used these settings for the Xbox 360 and am trying to backup all my dvd's to stream them. I rip the files using DVD fab and then use handbrake to convert the Video_TS folder to a .mpeg4 however the resulting mpeg4 file is not playable in windows media center. I have tried this 3 different times on 2 different DVD's and it has failed to play every time. Any suggestions?

Tried using handbrake, but the devs have pretty much stated they have absolutely no care to even try and get support for enconding to WMV. So if you want 5.1 audio on your XBox, you'll need to look somewhere else for your encoding software. TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress does a fantastic job of this and supports a wide array of formats. Been using it to encode my entire DVD collection. About 130 DVD's down and a lot more to go.

Thanks for the handbrake update. It could have used a how to rip the dvd (movie/TV series) from anydvd section. I get the encoding part with Handbrake but not the part where you rip the dvd to hard disk. Do I just rip the entire disk to HD or do I select certain files, format?....I do have clone dvd2.

Also, I've been searching online for weeks and there seems to be no clear guidelines for ripping TV series DVDS. We need a how to rip TV series with menus and without menus and what to use to play them back? It took me a while to realize if I rip the entire DVD to VOB or ISO I could play it back with menus with VLC but it doesn't work with PS3 media server (not with menus when viewing). Its this kind of stuff that is driving me crazy and makes me just want to buy this instead.....

Also what is the best app to play them back on? There seems to be many options but which works best for each device. In my case I can hook my Laptop with Windows 7 to my TV and stream from my Windows Home server or use my PS3 or 360. Guess my issue is I have to many options which makes it even more complicated. ;)

Just got done two days ago encoding the last of my ripped DVDs. I think it was about 60 or so movies in all. It's great to have them on the PC, all compressed and easily archivable. May I recommend using a DVD drive you don't care about? Basically, if you got a Bluray drive, you wouldn't want to run up the mileage on it because it's more expensive than a $40 Light-On DVD+RW.

My friend was encoding straight from the DVD and his laptop DVD drive went up (I warned him). Fortunately Asus is replacing the drive and he borrowed a USB drive to get the job done, but still...ripping it to the drive then queing it up is the best way. It spins the DVD drive less. I even discovered that toward the end, my Plextor IDE drive I had was giving me some trouble during a rip and would freeze the OS (Windows 7 of all things!). I was forced to rip the rest with the SATA LG Bluray drive I had (faster). This reminded me of how I hate popping a disc in to a PC and no matter what, it seems to halt everything until it spins up. My new WD Black hard drive would go solid, and lock the OS up forcing a reboot.

Just some words from the wise who just did it...been there, done that.

This was great i have been useing handbrake for some time now but had
no idea how to use some of these features. This should really come in
handy.

As a side note does anyone know how to rip out individual
episodes form TV series dvds. With some shows each episode is a
different .vob file in the vide_ts folder and it is a simple matter of
cutting and pasting, but other shows have all the episodes on the disc
jamed together in two or three files. Is there a simple way to split
apart these episodes without manually entering in time segments to
create 'clips'?

I have a few episode discs formatted this way and was able to create files for each episode by selecting the chapters that contain that episode. For example, lets say disc 1 has 4 episodes on it, but only 1 VOB thats just under 4 hours long. If you play it in PowerDVD (or others) first, you should notice that episode 1 starts at chapter 1, episode 2 on ch 9, etc. Make a note where each episode starts and then narrow down the chapter range in HandBrake so it creates 4 files like this: Episode 1: VTS_1 Chapters 1-8Episode 2: VTS_1 Chapters 9-16Episode 3: VTS_1 Chapters 17-24Episode 4: VTS_1 Chapters 25-32